AN: Hola! Look, a chapter! Yay, I did a thing! I would normally write more for you here, but I am so so so tired, so I'm not going to ramble. You know what to do!
When Skye and Melinda arrived back at the plane, they found the team in varying states of chaos. Ward was sitting at the kitchen table with a cord of rope which he was aggressively tying special knots into. Coulson was pacing back and forth in front of FitzSimmons, who were loudly arguing about the impossibility of some science crap or whatever. May assessed the room quickly and then walked up to Fitz (pushing past Coulson to do so) and handed him the camera device thing that Skye had seen her using earlier. The pair quickly shut up and stared at it for a moment before taking off and running down to the lab. Coulson just gave May a look and walked away, leading her into his office.
Now that everyone else had left, Skye went and sat across from Ward.
"What's this?" she asked, playfully tugging at one end of the rope.
"Normally when I'm worried about something, I clean my guns," he admitted sheepishly, "but since that's not an option right now I figured that this would be a good alternative. It's not really helping."
Skye gently took the cord from his hands. "Agent I-can-take-out-an-army-of-villains-with-my-pinky Ward is worried? Isn't this kind of thing basically just every day, run of the mill stuff for S.H.E.I.L.D.?"
"Yeah, it is. For S.H.E.I.L.D." he emphasized. "Normally when something of this scale goes down, we have backup. We have dozens of scientists figuring out tech that will work against these things, and we have hundreds of agents ready to go in, no matter the cost. But now we have two seasoned agents, one rookie, two science officers and one criminal who can't even have a gun. I just don't see how six people can deal with something this big!"
"Who says we have to?" Skye asked. "Yeah, S.H.E.I.L.D. is technically gone. But you don't think we could call half of those agents back in a heartbeat? My guess is that you're going to have to deal with that comment you made to Maria about Black Widow before all this is over."
Ward laughed nervously. "Yeah, that probably wasn't a smart thing to say, in hindsight."
"Damn straight. Anyways, I'd imagine AC is briefing Mel on everything that's happened so far, and it looks like FitzSimmons are also in the loop, so you wanna fill me in?"
"Only if you return the favour" he replied.
"Fair enough. Mel and I saw them. Four of them. These things are massive, Grant, and their body is basically a weapon in and of itself. Mel got some specs on them I think, with the thingamabob she gave to Fitz…
"God it was terrifying though. I mean, I saw the pictures before we went but to actually see these creatures, live…" Skye's eyes were vacant as she stared into space, her forehead crinkling slightly at the thought. Ward reached over and took one of her hands in both of his.
"Hey, stay here, with me. Fear will destroy you more than those creatures ever could. Yes, there is some weird crap out there, but we do have the power to take care of it."
"With great power comes a ton of weird crap that you are not ready to deal with" Skye laughed under her breath.
"What?"
"Nothing. Just some advice I gave someone once… Guess I should have listened too."
"You're scared. I get it. I've been freaked out by a mission before to. But just keep in mind, you're here for a reason. You're here because you can do this. So don't let that fear and self-doubt grip you; have faith in yourself."
"That's why you clean your guns, isn't it? To do something that you can control, to prove to yourself that you're still in charge of the situation?"
Grant grinned a bit. "Yeah, I guess it is."
"Would going down to the training room with me help?"
"Knowing that you'll be a bit safer? That will always help."
They walked towards the stairs but just as they were passing by the lab Simmons's voice came over the PA. "You lot will want to come see this!" she cried.
Skye rolled her eyes but turned into the lab anyways. She looked confused when Ward let go of her hand and stood just outside the doorway, but he held up his wrist to remind her again of the continued stipulations on his second chance. When Coulson came down a moment later, he pulled out his phone and pressed a few buttons.
"You can come in now, Ward."
Grant followed Phil and joined the rest of the team around the holotable. Simmons was practically bursting as she waited for everyone to file in. When they were all there, she began by pulling up a projection of a strand of DNA.
"This is from the data that the scope pulled" Simmons explained, gesturing to the device that May had used earlier. "One of the things the scope reads is DNA. Brilliant technology, really… Anyways, yes. This is the creature's DNA. And this" she said, pulling up a second strand, is a strand of the DNA found in a human. Now, at first glance they are actually very similar. In fact, I had to double check that the scope had read it correctly, but it did. Then I looked closer and discovered that the nucleotides had been rearranged!" She looked around at all the blank faces and simplified things a bit. "Basically, the proteins, or nucleotides, in a strand of DNA are arranged in a certain way, and that arrangement dictates how the cells will form. There are other differences that one can expect to see between plant and animal cells too; the number of chromosomes, the size of the genomes, I could go on. But essentially, these creatures have the DNA of a human, with rearrangement in the nucleotides which bring it to a plant like state!
"Now, these are the results we got back from the samples in the water" she continued as she pulled up the aforementioned data. "Notice the elevated levels of carbon; Carbon is an element that is found in high concentrations in organic matter, but in even higher levels in plants than in humans. While bodies of water often do have a certain level of carbon in them, this quantity is far outside of the norm. And there's also this little guy" she said, bringing up a model of the compound she hadn't been able to identify earlier. "It's not from our planet, which is why the mass spectrometer wasn't able to figure out what it was, but once I got it back here the S.H.E.I.L.D. database had some insight.
"It's from Mars, sir. Our British counterpart, U.N.I.T, entered it into the international database some time ago. From what I understand of the file, there was an incident on the planet. The water there had its own life force, was able to mutate human subjects. It would appear that a small amount of that water, perhaps no more than a single drop, was introduced into our water system. Now, because the compound is so diluted here, it was unable to act in the same manner as it did up there, but it's reproduced and is growing stronger."
"So what's your theory then?" Coulson asked.
Simmons bit her lip for a moment before answering grimly. "I'm afraid that the creatures we're dealing with used to be humans, sir. I believe that the combination of factors here are affecting the bodies of previously drowned victims. It's not strong enough to transform living bodies, but I mean, there are hundreds of people who have drowned over the past century… I think that the Martian compound has reanimated them, while taking in influence from the carbon which gives them their strong and spiked skin; my guess would be that their skin is a lot like tree bark. The presence of both variables was stronger the farther out to sea we went, so it makes sense that that is where the transformations are happening."
"So you're saying these things are people?" Skye exclaimed.
"Not exactly… Corpses, really" Simmons mumbled.
"So they're not related to frost giants at all?" May asked.
Simmons shook her head. "The similarities seem to be almost completely superficial. The shared traits indicate the possibility that the martian water that's causing the disturbance shares an ancient origin with Jotunheim, but as all cells do it's mutated significantly since then, and there are nearly no structural similarities that remain between this compound and any Jotunheimian artifacts that we have."
"How do we take them out?" Ward interjected.
"Well, that's the thing. See, U.N.I.T never really found a cure to this issue back then, they just abandoned planet. So I don't know if there's any way to reverse the transformation… It might be possible to come up with a way of putting them down, but we haven't found it yet."
"Keep trying" Coulson replied tersely as he left. Simmons nodded briskly, but leaned tiredly against one of the tables as soon as everyone but Fitz had left.
AN: And before you all start asking, YES, that was a Doctor Who reference, NO, this is not going to become a crossover. It just so happened that DW had a piece of info in it that I thought was useful for my plot, so I am using it a bit here but none of the characters from DW are going to be showing up. I'm JUST stealing the science.
Anyways, Reviews make me happy, work makes me tired, you guys are great, and I will do my best to keep writing for you! XOXO